Fargo Rock City (14 page)

MTV premieres
Headbanger's Ball
at 11 P.M.

Watching random rock videos from 1987 is not nearly as nostalgic as you'd expect it to be. You'd think the old images would cause hard rock memories to come rushing back into your consciousness, but that doesn't really happen. In fact, you're struck more by what you
don't
remember.

This is a relatively unique sensation, especially when compared to other modern forms of mass media. It's certainly not true for conventional TV, the most recycled form of entertainment that's ever been created. I see
The Wonder Years
more often today than I did when it was broadcast originally; I still catch
Happy Days
constantly, and I had already seen virtually every episode of that series (via syndication) before I entered sixth grade. Cable has made television less memorable by making it eternally contemporary. There really isn't any era (or genre) of TV that I can't find whenever I want. The VCR and Blockbuster Video have done the same thing with the film industry—it's easy to reexperience
St. Elmo's Fire, Urban Cowboy,
and
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
in the scope of a single evening.

Music is also easy to recapture (at least in a sonic sense). When people buy records and cassettes, they usually hold on to them—and if they don't, it's almost guaranteed that the songs have been transferred to CD. I still possess 98 percent of the
music I've purchased (or dubbed) over the past fifteen years. However, I probably have access to less than 2 percent of the videos I've seen in that same period, and it's likely I'll never see most of them again.

Music fans attack MTV constantly, and usually for two reasons: (a) it doesn't play enough videos, or (b) it plays the same video over and over and over again. Both criticisms are valid. And as a result, there is a vast library of videos that are played briefly and never seen again. While Nick at Nite will replay the entire run of a situation comedy, very few videos have a life outside their fleeting window of popularity. This even applies to most tracks from major artists. Oh, you'll see “Hungry Like the Wolf” twice a year for the rest of your life—but when's the last time you caught the vid for “New Moon on Monday” or “Skin Trade”? There's an elite percentage of videos that will always surface in countdowns and retrospectives (“Sledgehammer,” “Billie Jean,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” etc.), but most clips do not survive the passing of time. For example, the Black Crowes video for “Remedy” was on ultraheavy MTV rotation in the summer of 1992, and I saw it every single day (often twice or thrice) for three straight months. The image of Chris Robinson dancing barefoot has been forever tattooed into my optic membrane. However, I haven't seen “Remedy” in the past three years. It's entirely plausible that I may never see it again.

This is why I was literally ecstatic after my discovery of
Mike's Videos #1
and
Mike's Videos #2.
For a pseudo-scientist studying the video art of '80s hair metal, this was the equivalent to finding the Dead Sea Scrolls in my parents' basement.

Who's “Mike,” you ask? Mike was a guy I went to college with (although once he turned nineteen, he started calling himself “Rex,” which was a nickname I had given him simply to avoid confusion with another guy named “Mike”). As a junior and senior in high school, he liked to tape rock videos—but not off MTV. In Mike's hometown, you couldn't get MTV unless you had a satellite dish. Instead, he watched
Night Tracks
on TBS, which was actually better, because they played videos that MTV banned
(like L.A. Guns' “One More Reason”). Mike exclusively taped metal videos, along with a handful of nonmetal clips he evidently thought were cool enough to make the cut—Bad English, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, UB40, Rod Stewart, and a few other inexplicable additions.

As sophomores at the University of North Dakota, we would periodically watch these tapes when we were drinking vodka in our residence halls, mostly because cable services were not yet available in individual dorm rooms. When fall semester ended in December of 1992, we all prepared to go home for a month-long Christmas break. I was going back to my farm in Wyndmere, where I didn't even have any friends anymore (much less cable services). I had no idea how I was possibly going to entertain myself for the next four weeks. When I mentioned this concern to Rex (a.k.a. The Artist Formerly Known As Mike), he loaned me two videotapes (labeled with Scotch tape). I didn't remember to take them back to school with me in January, and Rex never missed them. Who would have? By May, I had completely forgotten that these tapes even existed. They ended up getting thrown into a box with about fifty other videotapes, most of which had been used by Mom to tape
Falcon Crest.

Seven years later, I was home visiting my parents in 1999. Once again, I was unspeakably bored (I guess that's one thing that hadn't changed). I found a box full of videotapes in the spare bedroom, and I started randomly throwing them into our VCR. Along with the 1988 NCAA Final Four, a PBS special on serial killers and a shitload of Jane Wyman footage, I came across these two gems. I almost started to cry. For a guy writing a book on heavy metal, it was the find of the century.

The eleven-plus hours of raw footage (taped on SLP) are rough; many videos are partially cut off, and all of
Mike's Videos #2
has static and a vertical shake. Some were taped in stereo, some in mono, and a few were somehow taped in both. But it's still a miraculous collection of glam rock's video age. Since Mike was dubbing any big-haired band that happened to stumble across the screen, the tapes captured bands that no modern
videographer would have possibly thought to include—Giant, EZO, King Diamond, and other such trashy flashy easy action. This kind of random sampling provides a staunchly realistic representation of what early metal videos were truly like. Mainstream reality is always founded on commercial obscurity.

Predictably, most of what's on
Mike's Videos #1
and
#2
is primitive. But that's no reflection on how watchable the material is. Many of the cheapest, cheesiest clips from a 1989 installment of
Night Tracks
were superior to videos made today, mostly because modern videos have adopted an enforced artistic agenda that's counterproductive to entertainment. Perhaps the smartest statement ever made about the video medium was written by Rob Sheffield in
SPIN
's ten-year anniversary issue: “Van Halen's 1984 ‘Jump' was a self-directed, relatively low-budget video. Van Halen's 1991 ‘Right Now' was a tasteful, clever, sterile montage of special graphics that looked exactly the same when it became a soft-drink commercial. ‘Jump' lives in the soul of everybody who has seen it, while ‘Right Now' represents MTV's idealized vision of itself as a serious art medium.”

At first glance, this might seem more like a shot at Sammy Hagar than a thesis statement on the video age, but it makes an important point. As the emphasis of video-making moved away from its original objective—the unconditional goal of pushing albums—the videos became more interesting, but less effective. “Jump” is fundamentally a commercial for
1984,
and most hard rock videos from that era were built on the same premise. The goal of the record label was to (a) let people see the band, and (b) convince them to
hear
a song that listeners might normally ignore. In “Right Now,” the band is hardly ever on the screen—and the accompanying music is supposed to make people
read!

This is not to say that “Right Now” is a bad video. It's very good. I honestly don't know if “Jump” necessarily “lives in my soul” any more than “Right Now” does, nor do I understand what's so horribly bad about selling Pepsi. But Sheffield's general premise is dead-on accurate. The video for “Right Now” couldn't possibly make viewers like Van Halen any more than they already did, and
it probably made some of them like Van Halen less (if they thought it was boring or pretentious, or if they really hated Pepsi). But “Jump” made me
love
Van Halen. It was like going to a club and stumbling across the coolest band in town: You saw the group's personality, you had something to look at while the catchy hook was latently hardwired into your brain, and you got
the idea.
And what was “the idea”? The easy answer is “nothing”—but the real answer is everything that was ever perfect about Van Halen and rock 'n' roll. I could never explain why so many people like Van Halen, but anyone who has seen “Jump” can figure it out.

“Right Now” is an endless string of important ideas that are supposed to remind us about what “really matters.” In that regard, it fails. I don't think about my life one iota differently because of that video; the aggregate of hundreds of concepts ultimately equates to nothing. Meanwhile, “Jump” was an endless string of … well, of “jumping.” The goal was to make people think Van Halen was a pretty cool rock band. Obviously, it worked. Granted, the motivation for the latter pales in comparison to the goals of the former—but “Jump” is half of something, while “Right Now” is all of nothing.

Sheffield's implication is that the “Right Now” video was too much like a television commercial from the day it was created, and his proof is that it was nicely converted into a soda advertisement without much editing. In a strict conventional sense, I suppose that's true, but the argument really doesn't stand up when you look at the application. The original video didn't make me want to buy
For Unlawful Carnage Knowledge,
and the accompanying commercial didn't make me want to buy a twelve-pack of pop. Meanwhile, “Jump” sold Van Halen. “Jump” was more mercenary than any other video Van Halen ever made, because
all it did
was pitch the product. It was nothing
but
a commercial. Of course, adopting that philosophy always seems to be the best thing that can ever happen to pop music, anyway.

Videos like “Jump” were the cornerstone of the metal video genre. It's a specific type of creation I call the “live without an audience” video. Every band who made at least two videos made
at least one of these: It's the group, performing a prototypical stage show, with no one else in the building (except, I suppose, the camera crew—and in the case of Autograph's “Loud and Clear,” an exclusive audience of Ozzy Osbourne, Vince Neil, and a bunch of foxy whores). The intention is to present the band as a living entity, but there's no attempt to fool anyone into thinking this is actually a “live” event; often, band members change clothes several times during the clip, and the wardrobe switches are all edited into one seamless track. Smoke machines were often utilized, and the three obligatory shots were (a) a vocalist running with the microphone stand, (b) a guitar player sliding on his knees during a solo, and (c) the drummer pointing at the camera with his drumstick and smiling (or snarling, if the band happened to be pretending they worship Satan).

To break up the concert footage, most videos would insert random, unrelated scenes that made the piece “unique.” Common items were girls in tight dresses, shots of the band laughing (or sleeping) on the tour bus, sneaky men wearing trench coats, birds (particularly doves and crows), girls dancing in cages, and/or a horse walking through fog. For the song “All We Are,” the female-fronted German band Warlock blew up cars, much like Wendy O. Williams did.

Sometimes the director simply had the group perform in a weird place, like a church or an open field. The best location was for Raging Slab's “Don't Dog Me,” where the country-fried metalheads rocked out on a flatbed trailer, pulled by a monster truck. You still see this kind of move from modern hard rock videos; a 1998 clip for the Deftones, “My Own Summer (Shove It),” had the band performing on top of shark tanks, interspliced with images of
Carcharodon carcharias
yapping at the camera.

From a promotional perspective, the “live without an audience” vid was especially suited for pointing out which member of the group was supposed to be the star. About 90 percent of the time, this meant the vocalist. However, there were some notable exceptions. The potential for “isolation footage” was perfect for egocentric band leaders who wanted to make sure everyone knew
who was writing the songs (and thereby paying the bills). In the Badlands video “Dreams in the Dark,” the focus is on guitarist Jake E. Lee; Lee had built a name for himself as Ozzy Osbourne's third axe player, and he was Badlands' creator and best-known commodity. Jimmy Page tried to reintroduce himself as a metal god with his
Outrider
album, and the accompanying performance video for “Wasting My Name” was centered around Page awkwardly re-creating his stage moves from
The Song Remains the Same.
Meanwhile, the vid for Bonham's “Wait for You” promotes that outfit's drummer more than any other video I've ever seen; this is obviously because the drummer was Jason Bonham, the group's namesake and the son of deceased Led Zep percussionist John Bonham.

Part of the allure of “live without an audience” videos is that they capture the universal teen experience of lip-synching songs in front of the bedroom mirror. A fabricated performance allows the camera crew to get tight shots of the artists, so the viewer is assaulted with a sense of hyper-reality. You could be sitting in the front row of a Warrant concert, and you'd still never be as close to Jani Lane as you are in the video for “Down Boys.” Since everything is shot (and reshot) a hundred times, everything is perfect; every stage move can be choreographed and accentuated. The director can also play with size and scale: In Ratt's “Round and Round” video, all five members of the band are squeezed into the main shot. It's like a portrait of the group, and it makes the audience perceive them as a gritty, focused unit. It was just as easy to create the opposite perception. In “You Give Love a Bad Name,” the members of Bon Jovi are spread all over a mammoth concourse (which even included a fake audience!), and it immediately made them seem like a supergroup; it also provided opportunities to isolate the singular star power of its singer.